Doc Soup

A Table In Heaven

by James McNally on December 5, 2007

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

A Table In Heaven
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.

A Table In Heaven (2007, Director: Andrew Rossi): Sirio Maccioni first opened Le Cirque in New York in 1974, after years and years of working his way up from busboy to waiter to maître d’hôtel. His star rose through the 70s and 80s and the res­taurant attracted the rich and famous, including Henry Kissinger, Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan. But as the film begins in 2004, the place has grown a bit stale, and the crowd of old reg­u­lars (and the emphasis is clearly on “old”) are dying off and no new cus­tomers are repla­cing them. Sirio decides to close and reopen in a new loc­a­tion. With his three sons Marco, Mario and Mauro, he sets out to plot the future of the family busi­ness. A new res­taurant will be a fresh start, with a new loc­a­tion, a new chef, a new menu, and a new atti­tude. At least that’s what the younger gen­er­a­tion wants. Sirio is from the old school, though, and is not willing to give up his micro­man­aging ways. Andrew Rossi’s camera was there to cap­ture it all: Sirio’s charming tale of an uneducated Tuscan immig­rant made good, his years of building rela­tion­ships with New York City’s most rich and famous den­izens, the gradual fading of his repu­ta­tion, and then his family’s often frac­tious effort to get their groove back. Though it seems at times like a par­tic­u­larly rancorous episode of the Food Network’s Opening Soon, there are greater forces at work in the Maccioni story. Sirio com­plains bit­terly of get­ting old, and refuses to retire. And yet the res­taurant cul­ture has changed and passed him by. His sons recog­nize this and want des­per­ately to attract a younger cli­en­tele, but Sirio’s loy­alty is to the people who helped him make it, and it hurts his new ven­ture. Resistance to change is really about the fear of obli­vion (through death and for­get­ting) and Sirio’s struggle is one that all of us can understand.

Luckily, the story doesn’t end when the film does, and it appears that the new Le Cirque is finally adapting to the new envir­on­ment. Instead of singling out celebrities and treating everyone else as second-class cit­izens, the new cul­ture prefers that everyone have the same exper­i­ence, and from all accounts, they’re trying. The menu has been freshened as well, des­pite Sirio’s objec­tions. A bad review from the New York Times, along with the footage of the opening, made it pain­fully obvious that the res­taurant needs more than nos­talgia and a cha­ris­matic owner to appeal to the new gen­er­a­tion of diners.

Rossi has cap­tured more than a res­taurant or a family story. He’s given us a glimpse of a man on the run from his own mor­tality, a man who’s cul­tiv­ated “friend­ships” among the most vis­ible and powerful only to realize that it won’t save him in the end. It’s heart­breaking and a little bit ter­ri­fying. For me, the most sat­is­fying moments are not in the res­taurant at all, but around the table when Sirio’s long­suf­fering wife Egidiana serves up a simple meal of pasta to the whole family. It’s a shame that the man has so little time for that sort of meal.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Andrew Rossi from after the screening. Hot Docs/Doc Soup pro­grammer Sean Farnel mod­er­ates and asks the first few ques­tions himself:

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Duration: 13:46

Official site for the film

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: Doc Soup, Documentaries, Toronto Film Festivals

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Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)

by James McNally on November 8, 2007

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Director: Jason Kohn): First-time dir­ector Jason Kohn’s film was a con­tro­ver­sial winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this past year, and after seeing it, I can under­stand why. It’s a travelogue of sorts, whisking us around Brazil to talk to police, politi­cians, pro­sec­utors, busi­nessmen, vic­tims of kid­nap­ping, and even a kid­napper him­self. The film’s tagline is “When the rich steal from the poor, the poor steal the rich” and the basic out­line is that it’s a film about a cul­ture of theft. We see all the pre­cau­tions the rich are forced to take to avoid the ransom kid­nap­pings that are now wide­spread in cities like Sao Paolo. They buy bul­let­proof cars, they take heli­copters and con­tem­plate implanting micro­chips under their skin. We hear from a kidnap victim who had both of her ears sliced off, a common tactic of the kid­nap­pers to show how ser­ious they are. Kidnapping is such a growth industry that now plastic sur­geons have developed ways of cre­ating new ears from rib car­tilage. On the other hand, we’re intro­duced to cor­rupt politi­cian Jader Barbalho, whose graft included the estab­lish­ment of frog farms to launder gov­ern­ment grant money. Recurring images of the frogs, including a mem­or­able sequence of one frog devouring another, seem to work as a crude meta­phor. With a pop­u­la­tion of 20 mil­lion, Sao Paolo’s res­id­ents are just as crammed together as the hap­less frogs, and the res­ulting anarchy is almost inevitable.

Kohn’s film is full of start­ling and often beau­tiful imagery, and his con­scious decision to shoot on film and in ana­morphic widescreen tells me a lot. Along with a jaunty soundtrack of Brazilian samba, the gor­geous images look better than they have a right to. I caught myself asking whether a film about such ugli­ness had a right to look so pretty. And I think that’s where my problem with the film lies. It feels like a carefully-constructed object that was planned around aes­thetic, rather than moral, con­cerns. It looks great, but I’m just not sure there’s a real heart to the film. Many of the director’s choices seem cal­cu­lated to dis­tance the viewer from the hor­rors he’s observing. For instance, Kohn made the decision to forego sub­titles in many of the inter­views, including the kidnap victim’s. Instead, we hear the dia­logue in Brazilian Portuguese, and then hear the trans­la­tion in English from the trans­lator, who is also in the frame with the sub­ject. It’s a strange effect. As well, there is no attempt at any ana­lysis of the prob­lems of Brazil, other than a throwaway line about how the Portuguese estab­lished Brazil simply to plunder it.

I remember hearing as a young stu­dent about how Brasilia was designed from the ground up as the new cap­ital of Brazil, and the film does convey some of the tar­nished futur­istic optimism that was coming out of the country in the 60s and 70s. Kohn described the film as a kind of “non-fiction science-fiction” film, and I think he does a pass­able job of con­veying the feeling that Sao Paolo’s sin­ister land­scape may soon seem very familiar to the rest of us.

But I’m still con­vinced that this is more an exer­cise in style than substance.

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: brazil, corruption, Doc Soup, Documentaries

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